Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner • The Music of Anthony Braxton Pi Recordings PI106
In the 1980s, jazz conservatives challenged Braxton’s jazz bona fides (he didn’t care; he’s now an NEA Jazz Master), but much of his ’70s music was designed to get a band up and moving, as Lehman’s selection reminds us: the opening 34a with its revolving repetitions, ferocious six-beat bass line, and contrasting smooth and “jerky” (Braxton’s word) horn phrases on top; craggy 23g where the tension between a repeated melodic figure and stop-time punctuations from bass and drums foster an unsettled, layers-out-of-sync feeling. Braxton has always encouraged musicians to try on his tunes and to adapt (or combine or juxtapose) them as they see fit. Interpreters needn’t observe the length of the form when they improvise, and there are no stated chord changes to follow. Lehman and his trio’s longtime rhythm section, bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Damion Reid, get right on those pieces’ wavelength. Lehman doesn’t imitate Anthony’s saw-tooth phrasing; his vocalized tone is closer to his other earlier mentor, Jackie McLean. The trio’s guest is fellow saxophonist Mark Turner, who, like Braxton (in a rather different way), was inspired by coolly cerebral Lennie Tristano tenor Warne Marsh. But here Turner mostly features his less-often-heard soprano, on which he gets unexpectedly raucous -- this album’s worth hearing for Turner alone. The quartet kick those compositions around. They can sound a little scrappy, but they play with a lot of heart. On rare occasions, Braxton is insistent about how certain pieces should be played. Composition 23c starts with a single short phrase which repeats and repeats, but with an additional phrase tacked onto the end with every repetition, gradually expanding the theme from two seconds to over thirty. (That additive form has been likened to “Twelve Days of Christmas.”) Braxton’s instructions are to stop after completing the whole sequence -- no improvising. Lehman splits the difference. First, the trio complete it as instructed -- plosive bass also playing the melody -- and then Turner jumps in to join them on a final reading of the complete line, after which the saxes vamp on the tune’s final staccato episode a while. The drummer’s role throughout is free, and Damion Reid’s rat-a-tat typewriter timing really sets the whole thing alight. They disobey instructions and find another way to animate the tune. On the other hand, a quick performance combining two other compositions barely engages with either. Composition 23a is meant to build very slowly from a ballad to a boil (it’s dedicated to Albert Ayler); Lehman and company duck out after the slow opening, moving on to 40a, in which Braxton directs the bassist to alternately pluck and bow the same eight-beat figure throughout, giving the piece a distinctive seesaw lope. The effect is lost, as Brewer plucks only, but they’re in and out of the tune in 30 seconds, so it hardly matters. It feels like filler. To put Braxton’s composing in broader context,
Lehman’s crew also play Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle” in whose
own mix of smooth and hectic phrases you can hear Braxton strategies coming. And they play
two Lehman compositions, with their own contrasting rhythms between front and back lines,
time-shifting and iterative figures and coiled rhythmic tension. Bryce Gonzalaz recorded
the foursome in front of a not very quiet crowd at Los Angeles bar/gallery ETA, though the
cheers speak for themselves. The caught-on-the-fly sound is just okay, but the stereo
picture puts you close to the bandstand: bass left, drums right. Lehman has said he wanted
to expose younger listeners to Braxton classics too good to forget. The leader’s own
tunes confirm that Braxton’s 50-year-old music still helps point the way. |
ltoist Steve Lehman is the second ex-Anthony Braxton student and
sideperson to record a program of his compositions in recent years. Like 2020’s Anthony
Braxton Project, by guitarist Mary Halvorson’s trio Thumbscrew, Lehman’s The
Music of Anthony Braxton focuses not on compositions from their own circa-2000 period
in Braxton’s orbit, but the 1970s, when a series of high-profile albums filled with
intricate and original compositions (ID'd by graphic titles and opus numbers) cemented the
saxophonist and composer’s reputation. These musicians play 1970s Braxton for the
reason boppers play early Dizzy Gillespie: his pieces set the style for what came after.